projectified

What's in Your Bag?

I have seen these posts in a few places so here is mine. Here is a list of everything in my Laptop bag:

1. Timbuk2 Large padded laptop bag. There are two sizes, get the bigger one. I have also noticed that Timbuk2 started making a version of this bag out of a lessor material. Mine has a backing on the inside of the outer material that is waterproof. The new ones do not have this. Not sure it matters since I'm not planning on getting it wet. :-) Great bag! Holds everything and is tough. I have had this bag almost a year and it looks brand new!
2. Toshiba M5
3. Spare laptop battery
4. iGo charger for laptop and phone
5. Cingular 8525 Phone (If Cingular reads this PLEASE release the upgrade to 6.0. PLEASE!!!)
6. Zune for music
7. IPod 30gig Video for Video (when the Zune lets you get TV shows I will can my IPod)
8. Cannon Powershot SD30 camera
9. GPS sensor for Streets and Trips
10. Bag with about 10 different USB cables (Ipod, Zune, Phone, etc) plus small screwdrivers, etc
11. Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000. Great if you are on the road and have small kids. Video chat through Live Messenger is not the same as being home but it helps my daughter!
12. Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 Wireless headset.
13. 80 gig USB hard drive (Music, Document backups, etc)
14. 320 gig USB hard drive (Virtual machine library, full machine backups)
15. 4gig USB Flash Drive
16. 10 foot Network cable
17. Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Coolest\Geekiest mouse EVER. Bluetooth so you don't need to waste a USB slot on it. Just the right size and if you press a button and turn it over it has PowerPoint slide controls and a laser pointer!
18. Compact USB hub
19. Ziploc with tiny packets of decongestant, Ibuprofen, etc)
20. Small Moleskine notebook
21. Large quad rules Moleskine notebook
22. One novel (Right now it is an old Horatio Hornblower), one non-fiction book (Right now it is Halberstam's Best and the Brightest)
23. Travel Document holder for tickets, receipts and the like
24. CPR Kit (gloves and and mouth to mouth mask) (because you never know when you might need it)

Dashboard Spy

I found this guy via Treb "Dr Porkchop" Gatte and he is awesome! I have never seen so many dashboards. Anyone working on visualization and dashboards MUST go visit this site. Plus his RSS feed is not only full text (I HATE partial text RSS feeds) but it also gives you ALL his posts! I subscribed and got 92 posts!

Tags: business visualization, dashboard

The State of IT in America

OK. Things must be bad because Dice.com, a job search site spent the time to build this little game.

 

What is wrong with PowerPoint?

OK I have to ask. What is really wrong with PowerPoint. Tufte and those that agree with him keep saying things like “PowerPoint makes it hard to create good presentations” or “PowerPoint enables the creation of poor quality presentations” or “PowerPoint is a poor quality tool”. But what I never hear is solid examples of what exactly about PowerPoint makes it hard. Why is it poor quality? On what criteria is it being judged?

And more importantly I want to know what a “good” tool would look like. What features would a ‘good’ tool have that make it easier to create good presentations.

Another good discussion point to bring up is what is a presentation? Is it just a PPT file you find on the Internet or is it someone speaking with a PPT file up on the screen? Can you judge the quality of a speaker\PPT presentation just by looking at the PPT file? And is it fair to judge the quality of PowerPoint as a presentation tool by just looking at PPT files that were designed to be delivered with a human talking over them?

And just for those that have flamed me over the Tufte post: this is not about him per se. I'm over the post removal thing now. I just want to understand WHY he and others think that PowerPoint is to blame for poor quality presentations.

This Should be Interesting to Watch...

Primavera just released this product: Primavera IT Project Office This is an IT Governance application.

Pacific Edge has had the phrase "Project Office" as a trademark for at least 5 years. They also just broke into the IT Governance market recently with this product.

Pacific Edge has lawyers and they are not afraid to use them. I used to work there, I have seen it and it is not pretty. The people that run Pacific Edge now are hard core to say the least. This 'coincidence' is going to go over like a lead balloon.

I think this one will get messy.

:-)

Tools I Couldn't Live Without

Trillian Pro
Multi-provider IM tool. Lets me use the same UI for dealing with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL. Plus it is just a nicer UI to work in. It keeps a log of all my conversations, it lets me keep all open chat windows in a single container on the desktop so I don’t have a bunch of chat windows taking up space on my Windows bar. The company I work for (QuantumPM) has employees spread out all over the country and we make HEAVY use of IM for communications so I figure I owe it to myself to have a UI that makes it easier to deal with. $25

SnagIt 7.0
The coolest screen cap application I have used, EVER! Ive been using it since about 1999 and have loved it the whole time. Let’s me take caps of just the menu, of certain parts of the UI or even scrolling captures to get the whole page, even if it is more than one screen long! I can output to any format. It will auto-name them…the list goes on and on. Only $39.99 but if you have to do lots of screen shots it will be worth it!

Onfolio
Cool KM tool for capturing AND sharing content from the web or from docs you read. See this post for my opinions on this app. But it will suffice to say that I have only had the app for under a week now and I already use it 20 times a day! It comes in two flavors $29.99 for the or $79.99 for the Pro edition which gives you more output options.

MyIE2
VERY cool shell for Internet Explorer that adds a tabbed interface, ad blocking and a TON of options and cool time and work saving features. I always hated opening new windows if I wanted to NOT navigate away from the page I was on, plus it cluttered my task bar. MYIE2 also lets you save sets of open pages as “Groups” so you can open them all at the same time. Too many features to even go into. It is free too. You can also look at AvantBrowser for many of the same features at the same price.

NewsGator
Outlook based RSS/Atom aggregator. Brings newsfeeds into Outlook and treats them like posts\emails. Allows you to have all your feeds offline so it is great for laptop users since they can download their feeds and then take them with them on the road. I am now not sure what I would do without this application. It is at the very center of my personal strategy for learning and keeping up to date on the ever changing world of project management. It is $29.99

Lookout
Super fast searching for Outlook. I use this 20 times a day. Since I use NewsGator and keep many of the posts offline I use this to search my feeds as well. It is in Beta but coming along nicely. It is free right now and Im not sure what it will cost when it goes v1 but unless the developers go crazy and charge some HUGE price…I will pay it gladly. I figured out that in the last 2 weeks it has saved me about 3 hours (roughly) over the built in search in Outlook)

UltraMon
Makes multiple monitors much easier to deal with. It has a ton of features but the two I use most are the profiles (which lets you quickly setup monitor profiles if you, like me use a laptop with multiple monitors) and the 2nd Windows task bar. It adds a task bar to the bottom of the 2nd monitor so you don’t have to look back over to the main monitor to min or max an application running on the 2nd monitor. Very cool!

MindManager X5
Mind Mapping software that figured out that the WBS in a project looks a lot like a mind map. You can export your mind maps to a Project MPP file and it will retain the hierarchy as summary task\sub-tasks! A bunch of features I have not had time to look at yet (like it will read RSS feeds and then MAP them visually!) I use it for decomposing task hierarchies and braining storming. It is $199 but well worth the price.

VMWare WorkStation
Lets you have “virtual” computers within an application window right on your machine. So I can be running Windows XP on my laptop and have a VMWare Virtual Machine running on it that is running Windows Server 2003! If I did not have this software I would need 5 or 6 machines in my office. I have been using this software for a few years now and it is pretty amazing. It is $299 but also comes in Server versions for virtualizing your server environments.

Microsoft VirtualPC
This is pretty much the same concept as VMWare but it is made by Microsoft. Im in the process of moving away from VMWare and toward VirtualPC based on the amount of work I do with Microsoft and the obviously widespread use of the tool there. It does not have all the features of VMWare but it is also cheaper and does an excellent job. It is also only $129

Microsot Project\Projct Server 2003
If it were not for this product I would not even have a job. Well OK I would have a job but it would not be nearly as cool as this one! :-) The most popular\best selling, easiest to use and coolest Enterprise Project Management application out there. Sure I have a vested interest in this product doing well but don't we all have an interest in the tools we make a living supporting?

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part III

In Part II we looked at how WebLogs and RSS might be used in a Project Management setting. Now I want to look at how lightweight (or “low impact”) KM tools might be used by teams to share information. I do not mean lightweight or low impact in a bad way but rather in a good way. Many of the more traditional KM tools are ‘heavy’ in that they often require a shift in the way users do their work. They are heavy on process and workflow. While this can be very good in that it enforces a system of use that can be good for the organization it can also stifle the use of the tools. Low impact tools do not require a strict workflow to be followed and they do not have a significant impact on the everyday work that people do. They can be worked into almost any work routine with almost no effect on that routine.

One such tool is Onfolio. This tool integrates into the IE interface and acts as a collector of web pages, images or text snippets. These collections are organized by creating folders within the collection. When you capture an item you specify the folder into which the item should be placed. You also get to provide notes about the item and can also define other meta-data in the form of custom fields that you can define.

Now this might not sound revolutionary…yet. There are other applications that do similar things. But the really neat part is the Onfolio Publisher. This is where it gets really cool. With this you can create reports on the items you have collected. So if you collected a set of code snippets from various programming sites you could create a report and upload it to an intranet or internet site or email it to a coworker as a .mht file. You can even save the whole thing as an RSS feed. (Here is where it gets cooler.) You can save the report to an RSS feed and then upload that to an intranet\internet site where your coworkers or others can subscribe to it in their aggregators! Each report you create gets saved as a different RSS feed so they can subscribe to the ones that they like. You keep collecting and then every so often you update the report by dragging the new content into the report, save it and publish the feed to update the xml file. Poof! You have knowledge sharing going on with out a wildly expensive server-based KM system.

What I envision here for a future version of this product is a predefined report that goes and builds itself based on the contents of certain Onfolio folders and then publishes itself on a preset schedule. Then what you have is one very cool way for project teams to share the information they are finding in their own personal research about the project. The developers on your team have these Onfolio reports about code they have found. They also have reports about the research they are doing on the different ways the system could be architected. You are interested in the architecture stuff but not the code part so you only subscribe to their architecture feed! I have been told by people at Onfolio that this exact feature is on the list for a future release. But even as it sits the updating and publishing of a report would take no more than about 5 mins a day. Drag a few entries onto the page and click 2 or 3 buttons and you have updated your feeds.

I have been using Onfolio for about under a week and it is already part of my daily routine. I have collections for Project Server sites, competing product information, documents of interest, project and portfolio management sites, etc, etc. I find something interesting, I right click on the page in IE and I select the option to Capture Page to Onfolio. I select the folder and click OK. Done.

Im also told that they are looking at integration with many of the blogging packages so that you could capture pages or snippets of pages into Onfolio and then blog them right from inside Onfolio.

So I guess the call for Part III is to go check out Onfolio or one of the other apps like it and spend a hour checking it out and then think about how you might work a tool like this into your project team. How might this kind of tool increase the sharing of information among your team? What impact would this sharing have on your project? Download it and give it some thought.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part II

In Part I of this series I talked about Weblogs as a source of information for Project Managers for keeping up with the state of the art of PM. Now in Part II I will talk about how I think Weblogs could be used by PMs and by project teams to improve and expand the state of the art.

I picture WebLog software hosted on a corporate intranet and used by Project Managers as a combination of status report, informal issue log and project diary from the perspective of the PM. If done correctly this would become a much more valuable project artifact than the same old weekly status reports. It would be a documentary film in words of how the project was going each day. Post categories could be used to put posts into a specific context of status, issue, work report, etc.

Team members on the project could keep a WebLog to share solutions to problems encountered in the day to day work of the project. These could then be kept as a record for future teams on similar projects. Again post categories could be used to put the posts into context.

RSS feeds for each category in these WebLogs would let PMs, stakeholders, team members on the project or even team members on other projects get updates on the newest entries for those categories. Stakeholders could subscribe to the RSS feed for the Status category on the PM's WebLog to get instant micro-status updates. Team members could subscribe to a category on other team member's blogs that hold found code snippets, solutions to problems or discussions of how problems are going.

Often in a project team there are lots of emails that go out to a distribution list that includes the whole team. In many cases these lists can become jammed with emails that really only needed to go to the Devs on the team or to the testers. Other team members might be interested but not everyone! RSS feeds would help solve this problem. You have a set of standard categories in the Team Blogs. When a project starts you could subscribe to the blogs and categories that you find interesting. Then when a post is made it can be seen by all those that are interested in that subject or in that person's comments.

An app like Movable Type can support custom fields (as I understand it) so each entry could be marked with the project it pertains to so if a team member is working on more than one project it could be tracked in their blog entries.

I think that Weblogs and RSS feeds of their content could really become a powerful tool for PMs and their teams for sharing project information. Will it work for everyone? Certainly not but it does not have to work for everyone. If only 50% of your team decided to use blogs to share information as part of their daily routine it would be a huge thing. Movable Type is $150 so there is not a COST excuse.

The call? I'd like to see a project manager take the leap and use an internally installed blogging app like Movable Type to create a set of team blogs for their next project. If you do this please let me know how it goes.

Part III will touch on "Low Impact" KM tools.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part I

There are a bunch of new technologies and products out there that can have, in my opinion, a really big impact on Project Management as a profession. They are Weblogs, RSS and what I call "low impact" knowledge management tools. (This will be a multipart series of posts.)

Weblogs
Weblogs are a technology/tool that almost all PMs should at least explore on two levels: information source and project communications tool.

Info Source
Up until about 2 months ago I had almost completely stopped using the Internet as a source of information about PM. I was stuck in a rut of checking the same few sites for new papers. There were a few that I liked and did a good job of giving me info: Niwot Ridge for one was very good but even places like Gantthead seemed to just be giving me advertisements made up to look like articles and whitepapers. It should be noted that I have since visited Gantthead and found that the impression I originally stated here was very much mistaken. I feel now that I formed this opinion from WAY back in 1999 (when I last spent any real time there and the few times I went back I must have hit the wrong articles and they just reinforced my false impression) and things have obviously changed. Gantthead is certainly worth your time to check out. I felt like I was missing out. Then I installed NewsGator and found a few sites like Frank Patrick's blog. I started checking out their blogrolls and BAM. It was like turning a corner. There are a bunch of people out there blogging project management topics and they are all scary smart.

Reading a good WebLog is like getting to see what is inside the head of an expert that you usually only get to hear talk for an hour at a conference. If they are good at blogging and really do it well their blog is like a record of their thoughts and opinions on the subject. They change and evolve and get influenced by other bloggers on related topics. Reading blogs lets you read opinions of people you would not ever have thought about including in your scope of thought.

PM has been changing and adding concepts and knowledge so quickly it is hard to keep up. Blogs, in my opinion, are THE way that we as a profession will be able to keep up.

So the first call to arms here is this: go get an RSS reader (NewsGator, Bloglines, Feedster) and start looking for Project Management blogs. I have a list of a few of my favorites on www.projectified.com but you can also search Technorati or Feedster to find others. THEN after you have read a few blogs and see what they are about go and start one of your own. I use TypePad and it costs about $5 a month but there are free ones out there like Blogger and BlogSpot You have something to say about PM. You have experience that is unique. Share it with us and let us learn from it!

Part II of the Call to Arms will be for PMs to use WebLogs as a Project Team communications tool.

Stealth Causation

This was just freaky. I just finished doing a Project Server 2003 installation in Dallas. It went pretty well until I was about to leave. I had been testing and doing some early configuration of the system and everything was working great, including WSS. But today at 11am it stopped working. It was throwing tons of errors in the event log about how it could not connect to the database server PROJSVR01. I could open the admin page for WSS but could not edit any settings. It said that it could not find the database!

Now we had done NOTHING to the server. At all! It worked for 2.5 days and suddenly nothing! Really! I swear!

Then after like the 400th time reading these error messages the IT guy notices that PROJSVR01 is NOT the name of the server where the database is located. The name of the server is PRJSVR01 (PRJ not PROJ). Sure enough I look on the one page in the WSS admin page I can edit and sure enough the wrong name is there. It has PROJSVR01. The really freaky part is that nobody edited this value. It took me 10 mins to remember where the hell it was and the IT guy REALLY did not know where this setting was! And it had been working just fine for 2.5 days! Any thoughts before I give it away?

I had mistakenly entered the name of the server wrong when I extended the virtual server. But how is that possible you ask? Doesn't that page validate the server name and then even try to connect to that server with the username and password you supply? Yes and it worked just fine and that is why the system worked for 2.5 days. WSS was accessing the server just fine with PROJSVR01 and Project Server was accessing it with PRJSVR01!

Here is the really cool part. About a week before I got there the IT department built the server. It's name was PROJSVR01 (notice PROJ). Then they changed the name to PRJSVR01. The reason that everything worked was that the WINS and DNS servers on their network still had entries for the OLD name. I just happened to mistype the server name in that page in WSS so that it equaled the name that the server USED to be named. At 11am today the entries in WINS and DNS got deleted and the path WSS was using to get to the database was gone so it stopped working!

The bad news was that to fix it I had to "UN-Extend" the virtual server, extend it again and then run the Project Server WSS Wizard again. At least it worked!

I thought I had seen some odd issues but this was the more interesting.